"The UEFI secure boot mechanism has been the source of a great deal of concern in the free software community, and for good reason: it could easily be a mechanism by which we lose control over our own systems. Recently, Red Hat's Matthew Garrett described how the Fedora distribution planned to handle secure boot in the Fedora 18 release. That posting has inspired a great deal of concern and criticism, though, arguably, about the wrong things."

This isn't about getting things for free, or about making Windows more secure, it's about Microsoft making yet another anti-competitive move. Look at their entire history and if you honestly think that this is all about computer bootloader security, I've got a bridge to sell you. Bootsector viruses are almost a non-issue today. Maybe back in the sneaker-net days of the late eighties and early nineties where floppy-disk boot sector viruses were a huge problem, something like this would've been very helpful. However, today, if you encounter a virus that can attach itself to your boot process, it can also attach itself to other software much higher up the stack with just as much utility to an attacker.

What makes more sense to you, that they are locking the bootloaders to protect against an almost non-existent security threat, or that they are finally so terrified of competition with Linux and Android that they are trying to lock them out?